


remember me, love

by hydrospanners



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Dream Sharing, F/M, Force Shenanigans, Hurt/Comfort, Viios
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 15:34:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20491139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrospanners/pseuds/hydrospanners
Summary: "The Force flows through all things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together."It's been years since he last saw his wife, but when Doc starts experiencing strange sensations and having odd dreams, he knows it's the Force bringing them together somehow. But trapped on Ossus with no communications and no way out, seeing her again may bring as much pain as it does joy.





	remember me, love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hoiist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoiist/gifts).

> Wrote this for [hoiist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoiist) featuring her character, [Viios](http://hoiist.tumblr.com/tagged/ch:%20viios)! Sorry it isn't very sexy but I hope you like it anyway!!
> 
> I won't call it a recommended track cause it doesn't fit especially well, but I listened to [Shrike by Hozier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWLqdAJbu0A) on repeat the whole time I wrote this, if you're looking for mood music.

At first, he thinks it’s a cramp. Doc wakes from sleep with a clenched jaw, an echo of pain shooting up his thigh, and thinks maybe he needs to lay off the energy pudding for a while.

When it happens again, he figures it’s time to accept he’s not as young as he used to be. He figures he might need to work more muscles than the ones he’s building for the extremely athletic sex he hopes to have with his wife again some day soon.

Time waits for no man, he figures, so he makes changes. He eats whole foods, straight from the pilgrims’ fields, and he stretches with the Junior Jedi at dawn. He cuts back on the caf, drinks more water. He spends some quality time with his bunk. And after a few weeks, he thinks the problem is solved. He might not be immune to the effects of age, but he won’t be crippled by them either.

Then it happens again.

It happens again and it’s worse than before, liquid fire pouring through his veins that leaves him gasping for breath when he jerks awake. Awake, but blinking up at a ceiling that isn’t his, hearing the low murmur of voices he doesn’t recognize, with the feel of sheets softer than anything the Jedi have against his skin. Awake, but somewhere else. Somewhere different.

Some_one_ different?

Doc drops back into his quiet, scratchy reality with no warning, and he barely has time to grab the bin before the wretching starts.

It goes on for a long time. Over and over and over until his muscles ache and his vision blurs and his throat’s scraped raw from the acid. Until he’s collapsed on the floor of his bunk, sweating and exhausted with nothing left to heave and echoes of a burning pain still pulsing through his leg.

He pings Nadia from the floor, too tired to get up. He might not know much about the Force, but he recognizes these symptoms, knows them like the back of his own hand, and he knows they don’t belong to him.

He must really look like shit because Nadia doesn’t tease him at all when she shows up at his door, clutching her robe against the cold and blinking sleep from her eyes.

Stars, but he hopes Force visions don’t go both ways. He hopes she didn’t see him like that, hopes the first glimpse she’s had of him in five years wasn’t sweaty and pallid with hair stuck to his forehead and bile crusting on his lips.

He tries not to think about how she has bigger problems right now than the relative sex appeal of her errant husband.

“I saw her,” he croaks, his throat raw and burning. “Vii. I saw her.”

Nadia does him the kindness of not looking at him with pity. It’s why he called her. She’s not going to give him that look the other Jedi sometimes do, the one that says he’s an object lesson in the dangers of attachments. She’s not going to doubt his sanity because of his heart. She just gets him a wet rag and a glass of water and asks for every detail of what he saw.

He tells her. All of it, every color and every sound, every agonizing sensation. He tells her everything he experienced and every worry it awoke in him. He tells her about Vii’s cybernetics, about the poison and the failures, about what he thinks it all means.

Nadia doesn’t have any answers; Jedi rarely do.

Doc figures he won’t need their answers if he can get them from Vii herself. If he can get to wherever she is. But no amount of pleading or threatening will move the Jedi to open communications. They won’t let him leave, either. They can’t risk the safety of the whole colony because he had a bad dream.

He’s trapped. Helpless. Vii needs him and all he can do is wait for her to reach out. Wait for her to sneak into his dreams and share her pain with him again.

He sleeps as often as he can. He gives up caf and energy pudding and every other stimulant that’s ever helped him get through the day. He meditates with the Jedi and when that isn’t enough, he medicates too. He sleeps more than he’s awake, always thinking of Vii, always waiting.

Days pass, then weeks.

Nadia starts looking at him with the same knowing pity as the rest of them, her eyes flicking from his too-long hair to the beard covering his jaw. To the streaks of grey at his temples and the bags under his eyes. No one who sleeps so much should look so tired, but here he is.

And none of it matters.

There are no more cramps. No phantom pains, no voices he doesn’t recognize. No dreams. Nothing.

It’s just him and the weight of all his knowledge, all his skill that feels so fucking meaningless when he can’t use it to help her.

“If she isn’t reaching out to you,” Nadia tries to tell him, “it could just mean she isn’t suffering anymore. It could mean she’s fine.”

There’s another way her suffering could have ended, but Nadia doesn’t mention that.

“She wouldn’t want you to tear yourself apart like this,” she says. “Take care of yourself, Doc. Think of the good times.”

He does.

It hurts, like the way too-sweet food stings your teeth. It hurts, but it feels good too. It feels like relief, like warmth and sunshine and happiness he hasn’t felt in years.

They used to be so happy.

On the beach that day, one of the few perfect days in his life, no one had ever been happier than they were. Sand on their shoulders and salt in their hair--Doc closes his eyes and he can almost feel the heat of the sun warming his skin, can almost hear the crashing waves.

He opens his eyes and he can see it, can see everything just like he’s back there, like he’s living the moment all over again. Vii’s legs draped over his, ice cream cones in both their hands, the galaxy’s problems a million lightyears away. She looks just like he remembers, hair loose and tangling in the breeze, that ridiculous pineapple shirt falling off her shoulders. They bought a matching pair, but even the smallest size swallowed her. He made that hideous thing look good, but Vii--

Vii makes it almost unbearably sexy. Almost unbearably cute, too. It’s so unfair how she can be both at the same time. It’s more than a man can take.

He watches as her tongue slides along the curve of her ice cream, as the top scoop starts to slip from its perch. He watches her face, savoring every moment as she realizes what’s happening, as her expression pinches in utter betrayal, as the ice cream plummets right into the--

Into--

\--her hand?

Doc blinks.

Vii smiles at the half-eaten scoop of ice cream melting in her sandy palm. “Not getting away from me this time.”

“_Vii_?”

She looks up at him and her smile melts into shock. “_Doc_?”

She reaches for him without thinking, her hand still full of ice cream when she rests it against his cheek. He can feel the cold of it just like it was real, like all of this is real and not just some distant dream. Like this isn’t just a memory warped by longing and sedatives.

He leans into her cold, sticky fingers. “Vii,” he sighs.

She’s looking up at him with her eye wide and her mouth gaping open, her perfect, plush lips rounded in a way that’s just begging to be kissed.

So he kisses them. Gently. Tenderly. His lips on hers, all sweet pressure and soft caress. All delicacy and longing.

Vii sighs his name into his mouth and he can taste the sweetness on her breath, feel the heat of it on his tongue. He shivers, his mouth opening for her as she pulls him closer. Closer and closer, their noses crushed between them, breathing as one, moving together, touching, tasting…

He’s never tasted anything better than Vii, salt on her lips and sugar on her tongue.

Her kiss isn’t as delicate. It’s hungry and urgent, all nipping teeth and gasping breaths and long strokes of tongue. She’s devouring him, desperate in a way he rarely sees her, her hands all over him, sticky and gritty where they drag across his jaw and through his hair, where they slide down his throat and his chest, where they dig into his shoulders and his arms.

She kisses him until he’s dizzy, until he’s breathless and burning, hard for her though she’s barely even touched him.

Vii’s fingers cup his jaw, drawing his forehead down to rest against hers as she brushes her nose alongside his, shallow breaths mingling in the narrow space between them.

Doc doesn’t realize he’s crying until she kisses the tears from his cheeks.

“I’m here,” she whispers. “I love you. I’m here.”

His thoughts are so hazy, swallowed up with lust and longing and love, but there was something he needed to ask. Something important. Something--

“Your leg.”

He looks down, his throat closing up as her leg changes before his eyes, as warm, supple flesh melts into unyielding durasteel. “Gorgeous,” he chokes. “Gorgeous, your--”

Her thumb brushes the tears from his cheeks as she shushes him. It’s absurd that she’s trying to comfort him when it’s _her _leg, when it’s _her_ pain, but--

“I wasn’t there.”

“It’s okay,” she whispers back. “_I’m_ okay.”

But Vii’s never been good at lying, and she didn’t marry a fool. “If you were okay, you wouldn’t be here,” he says. “Gorgeous--” He gasps as phantom pain pulses in his hip, and Vii gasps with him, sagging against his chest, her hands clutching at his shoulders. It burns and it aches, stronger with every beat of her heart.

“Vii. Look at me, Beautiful.” She does. Her eye is glistening with tears, the color draining from her skin as she trembles, gasping shallow little breaths of air. He doesn’t need her to describe what she’s feeling because he can feel the echo of it, but he needs her to know what it is. He needs her to hear him, to tell whatever dipshit slapped this thing on her--”Your body is rejecting the implant, Vii. Something’s wrong and they need to--”

“I know,” she gasps, not quite looking him in the eye. “We waited too long and it’s not taking. I know.”

His heart clenches.

“I’ll be _fine_,” she insists, but the tremor in her voice does not reassure him.

“Tell me where you are, Gorgeous,” he pleads. “Let me _fix _this.”

“I can’t--” She winces, her lips pinching together. “I can’t think. I can’t remember.” Then another lance of pain strikes, and all she can do is bury her head in his chest, her fingers clutching at his shoulders tight enough to bruise.

He holds her. One hand on her back, gently stroking the places where hard metal meets soft skin, the other in her hair, fingers on her scalp, kneading and rubbing. He feels hot tears against his skin and presses kisses to the top of her head. It’s all he can do. All he can give her with so many lightyears between them.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

She trembles and she gasps and he keeps holding her, keeps whispering soothing nothings as the pain comes in waves like the water that laps at his feet. He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, doesn’t know if the rules of time work the same here as they do in the waking world. But he holds her and she clings to him and eventually, the pain passes.

Eventually, Vii slumps boneless against him, drawing in a long, shuddering breath, and there is nothing but the two of them and the memory they share, nothing but melted ice cream and the ocean and the sand and the sun.

“I just wanted to see you,” she whispers, once she has caught her breath. “Everything hurt and I just wanted to feel--”

“Happy?” Doc finishes for her. He smiles despite himself, despite everything, and he can feel her smiling too.

She presses a sweet kiss to his chest and looks up at him, her face so full of longing he almost can’t stand to look at it. “Did you think of this too?” She asks.

He nods. “It was a good day.”

“The best.”

He wants to kiss her again, to run his hands and his tongue all over her body, to give her as much pleasure as she’s had pain, but there’s clouds starting to cover the sun and he knows, somehow, that their time is running out.

“We’ll have good days again,” Vii says. And this time she isn’t lying. This time she isn’t just trying to take away his pain.

This is a promise.

“We’ll have good days again,” he says.

And Vii kisses him. Sudden and hard, her lips pressing hard enough to bruise, her eyes screwed shut. His eyes are still open, surprised, when the clouds move in front of the sun and--

Darkness.

Darkness and quiet, a sliver of moonlight coming through the window of his bunk, his sheets scratchy and hot against his skin.

Doc sits up in bed, throws back his quilt and swings his feet to the floor. He rubs the sleep and crusted tears from his eyes, the wisp of a dream dancing at the edges of his mind. Something about the ocean…

He limps to the fresher, his leg aching again, and curses the Jedi for trapping him here, for not having answers and not letting him find his own. He flicks on the light and stares at himself in the mirror, not recognizing the man who stares back. Not recognizing the swollen lips or the bloodshot eyes or the purple bruises blooming on his shoulders. He touches his fingers to his cheek, to the tacky, blue something that’s stuck to his beard, that he can’t remember being there when he fell asleep. It smells sweet, and against his better judgment, he licks it from his fingers.

It tastes like ice cream.


End file.
